We can’t see the future clearly, of theater or anything else, but we can look at the recent past and wonder how things will play out.

My questions about theater in 2024 are prompted by the major theater stories of 2023. The questions I have now mostly differ from the ones I had when I started these annual first-of-the-year posts about possible future trends in 2020 (which I began because I couldn’t pass up the pun: “Seeing 2020.”)

1. How will “the crisis” in theater be addressed?

There was much talk in 2023 about how the theater is in crisis, which stems largely from a decrease in audience attendance since in-person theaters reopened after the pandemic lockdown, leading to shuttered theaters, layoffs, curtailed seasons.

How will the theater community get people back to the theater? Will they?

And what will problem-solving look like in 2024.
Will there be a large-scale project to address the issues collectively?
Will the industry hinge its hopes on government largesse?
Will there be a series of practical solutions to individual obstacles, such as there were in 2023; for example: 

Due to cast illnesses, at several performances, Michael R. Jackson stepped into the musical he created, A Strange Loop, to portray the lead character, which was inspired by his own life.

Due to a rise in rowdy and rude behavior by theatergoers, Playbill started inserting a full page listing rules of etiquette, such as “Treat all theatre staff you see with respect and kindness…” and “Stop drinking alcohol immediately if you’re feeling tipsy. Drink some water.”

Due to a writer’s strike in Hollywood that threatened to cancel the Tony Awards broadcast, the producers agreed to put on the show without a script.

After the Public Theater killed Under the Radar, its annual theater festival, citing its cost, more than a dozen other theaters banded together to sponsor the festival without interruption.

Will there be more such collaboration among theater companies?

And how effective will the new crisis-managers be, given the turnover of so many long-time artistic directors? Three of the four non-profit Broadway theaters, for example, are looking for new leaders, and many more Off-Broadway have died or retired. Will the newcomers be overwhelmed? Or will they be able to see things freshly, and act decisively?

2. What role is there for theater in a world of increasing division, distrust and misinformation?

There long has been a different worldview between people who create (or seek out) theater in hopes that it will change the world, and those who want it to provide some respite from the world.

Since the return of in-person theater, this dichotomy has taken shape in a new way, with shows like “KPOP,” “Ain’t No Mo” and “Ohio State Murders” making it to Broadway last season but then closing early, having failed to find an audience. Supporters of such shows see the failure as one of “outreach” to new audiences. Detractors see it as one of the factors in the general decline in attendance — that too many theaters were too quick to prioritize new diverse works and works devoted to social justice, without bringing their existing audiences along with them.

There’s arguably room to accommodate both types of theater; both worldviews.  But how should theater respond when people no longer agree on what “the world” is – when, to pick one example, almost half the country supports a proven lie by an impeached and criminally indicted liar? When, to pick another example, differences over policy in the Middle East have led to a sharp rise in antisemitism at home. How will theater respond? Will it respond?

3. How will Artificial Intelligence affect live theater?

Will AI be the threat to the theater that it’s predicted (or feared) to be for human life in general? Will it, fot example, undermine dramatists’ copyright, and their livelihood?How will it benefit theatergoers and theater makers ?

I had two AI experiences the theater in 2023, both of them intriguing. One was the play “Prometheus Firebringer,” in which writer and performer Annie Dorsen sat at a desk on Stage Left and read an essay that explained that the play unfolding on Stage Right — a series of monologues recited by six carved heads dramatically illuminated – was generated by AI, including the script, the heads, and their voices. 

Then, before the start of a production of “A Christmas Carol,” I was able to have a conversation with Charles Dickens  has been adapted for the stage so often – both his words, and his voice, generated by AI – which suggested a way that AI can enhance the theatergoing experience without intruding on it.T

The show itself was a Virtual Reality experience, which prompts a more general question:

4. How receptive will the theater industry be to innovation, especially in technology?

I was taken aback, once in-person theater returned, how quickly and completely some theaters (and theaters critics) dismissed the innovations in digital theater that had occurred during the pandemic lock-down. But 2023 saw the mainstreaming of the “simulcast” with  Broadway plays “Between Riverside and Crazy” and “Jaja’s African Hair Braiding” and one Off-Broadway one, “Scene Partners” presented the final week of their runs on their New York stages and simultaneously livestreamed the performances to anybody who bought a ticket in homes across the nation. How many theaters will subscribe to the notion that digital theater, in the words of one of its pioneer Jared Mezzocchi, is “no longer a response to COVID, but a whole new way of thinking about audiences and the economics of theater?”

Doug Reside, the curator of the Billy Rose Theater Collection at the Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center, put digital theater in the larger context of the history of this interplay between theater and technology, in his new book “Fixing the Musical.” The book is a clear-eyed if implicit dismantling of the myopic view of theater as an unchanging ancient art form that has defiantly survived despite competition from new-fangled lesser forms of entertainment. The book demonstrates instead how much theater has thrived (rather than just survived) because of (not despite) the way it has collaborated (not competed) with the evolving arts and tools of modern life.”

What new technologies are in the pipeline, and will theaters react avidly or tepidly?

5. Who will drive the theater conversation? 

The end of 2023 saw the end of the twenty-year tenure of the theater critic at the Washington Post, Peter Marks, and possibly the end of any full-time theater critic there, one of the few such positions remaining in the country.  “As I say goodbye to my post at The Post,” he wrote on his last day, “I feel like a character in an existential play by Tom Stoppard: relinquishing an endangered job in a struggling business that covers a gasping industry….the theater needs more analysis, more debate, more audacious opining, not less. As part of that invigoration, it needs a healthy coterie of passionate skeptics, ironists, scholars and true believers to write about it. Also known as critics.”

There’s frankly not much encouragement for any of us who continue as critics to keep doing what we’re doing. Three years ago, I quoted a Broadway producer saying: “I expect the next generation of content creators to not care so much about critics.” But Pauline Kael famously said  “In the arts, the critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising.” Will that Broadway producer and future “content creators” really be satisfied when the only source is advertising?

Will we get some answers to these questions as 2024 comes into focus? We’ll see.